Zhaoning Zhang
2026
Sparrow: Text-Anchored Window Attention with Visual-Semantic Glimpsing for Speculative Decoding in Video LLMs
Libo Zhang | Zhaoning Zhang | Hongwanyang | Peng Qiao | Dongsheng Li
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Libo Zhang | Zhaoning Zhang | Hongwanyang | Peng Qiao | Dongsheng Li
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Although speculative decoding is widely used to accelerate Vision-Language Models (VLMs) inference, it faces severe performance collapse when applied to Video Large Language Models (Vid-LLMs). The draft model typically falls into the trap of attention dilution and negative visual gain due to key-value cache explosion and context window mismatches. We observe a visual semantic internalization phenomenon in Vid-LLMs, indicating that critical visual semantics are implicitly encoded into text hidden states during deep-layer interactions, which renders raw visual inputs structurally redundant during deep inference. To address this, we propose the Sparrow framework, which first utilizes visually-aware text-anchored window attention via hidden state reuse to fully offload visual computation to the target model, and leverages intermediate-layer visual state bridging to train the draft model with semantic-rich intermediate states, thereby filtering out low-level visual noise. Additionally, a multi-token prediction strategy is introduced to bridge the training-inference distribution shift. Experiments show that Sparrow achieves an average speedup of 2.82x even with 25k visual tokens, effectively resolving the performance degradation in long sequences and offering a practical solution for real-time long video tasks.
Alloc-MoE: Budget-Aware Expert Activation Allocation for Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Inference
Baihui Liu | Kaiyuan Tian | Wei Wang | Zhaoning Zhang | Linbo Qiao | Dongsheng Li
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Baihui Liu | Kaiyuan Tian | Wei Wang | Zhaoning Zhang | Linbo Qiao | Dongsheng Li
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has become a dominant architecture for scaling large language models due to their sparse activation mechanism. However, the substantial number of expert activations creates a critical latency bottleneck during inference, especially in resource-constrained deployment scenarios. Existing approaches that reduce expert activations potentially lead to severe model performance degradation. In this work, we introduce the concept of activation budget as a constraint on the number of expert activations and propose Alloc-MoE, a unified framework that optimizes budget allocation coordinately at both the layer and token levels to minimize performance degradation. At the layer level, we introduce Alloc-L, which leverages sensitivity profiling and dynamic programming to determine the optimal allocation of expert activations across layers. At the token level, we propose Alloc-T, which dynamically redistributes activations based on routing scores, optimizing budget allocation without increasing latency. Extensive experiments across multiple MoE models demonstrate that Alloc-MoE maintains model performance under a constrained activation budget. Especially, Alloc-MoE achieves 1.15× prefill and 1.34× decode speedups on DeepSeek-V2-Lite at half of the original budget.
DMHM: Density-aware Manifold Learning and Hybrid Mahalanobis Energy for LLMs-generated Text Detection
Tianle Liu | Zhiliang Tian | Zhen Huang | Tianlun Liu | Jingyuan Huang | Zhaoning Zhang | Chengcheng Shao | Dongsheng Li
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Tianle Liu | Zhiliang Tian | Zhen Huang | Tianlun Liu | Jingyuan Huang | Zhaoning Zhang | Chengcheng Shao | Dongsheng Li
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
As the text generated by large language models (LLMs) increasingly resembles human-written text (HWT), detecting LLM-generated text (LGT) is crucial to avoid malicious use of LGT. Recent research treats LGT detection as an out-of-distribution (OOD) detection problem and views HWT as the OOD. However, existing OOD detection methods assume that LGT is a single homogeneous distribution. In practice, LGT exhibits different characteristics under different generation conditions. Text from weaker LLMs tends to form distinct clusters and is easy to detect, whereas text from stronger models significantly overlaps with HWTs and is hard to detect. To address the issue, in this paper, we propose an LGT detection framework based on density-aware manifold learning and the construction of hybrid Mahalanobis energy. We apply density-aware manifold learning with Laplacian smoothness and density regularization in embedding space, amplifying differences between LGT and HWT. We further propose a density-adaptive hybrid Mahalanobis metric that combines global and local covariance via density weighting, enabling adaptation to the manifold-aware embedding space. Finally, based on the metric, we define the distribution energy as a measure of distribution discrepancy, and we employ energy learning and contrastive learning to separate distributions hierarchically, establishing a clear OOD decision boundary. Experiments show that our method outperforms strong baselines.
2025
Dovetail: A CPU/GPU Heterogeneous Speculative Decoding for LLM inference
Libo Zhang | Zhaoning Zhang | Xubaizhou | Rui Li | Zhiliang Tian | Songzhu Mei | Dongsheng Li
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Libo Zhang | Zhaoning Zhang | Xubaizhou | Rui Li | Zhiliang Tian | Songzhu Mei | Dongsheng Li
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
With the continuous advancement in the performance of large language models (LLMs), their demand for computational resources and memory has significantly increased, which poses major challenges for efficient inference on consumer-grade devices and legacy servers. These devices typically feature relatively weaker GPUs and stronger CPUs. Although techniques such as parameter offloading and partial offloading can alleviate GPU memory pressure to some extent, their effectiveness is limited due to communication latency and suboptimal hardware resource utilization. To address this issue, we propose Dovetail—a lossless inference acceleration method that leverages the complementary characteristics of heterogeneous devices and the advantages of speculative decoding. Dovetail deploys a draft model on the GPU to perform preliminary predictions, while a target model running on the CPU validates these outputs. By reducing the granularity of data transfer, Dovetail significantly minimizes communication overhead. To further improve efficiency, we optimize the draft model specifically for heterogeneous hardware environments by reducing the number of draft tokens to lower parallel verification latency, increasing model depth to enhance predictive capabilities, and introducing a Dynamic Gating Fusion (DGF) mechanism to improve the integration of feature and embedding information. We conduct comprehensive evaluations of Dovetail across various consumer-grade GPUs, covering multiple tasks and mainstream models. Experimental results on 13B models demonstrate that Dovetail achieves inference speedups ranging from 1.79× to 10.1× across different devices, while maintaining consistency and stability in the distribution of generated texts.
Correlation-Aware Example Selection for In-Context Learning with Nonsymmetric Determinantal Point Processes
Qiunan Du | Zhiliang Tian | Zhen Huang | Kailun Bian | Tianlun Liu | Zhaoning Zhang | Xinwang Liu | Feng Liu | Dongsheng Li
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Qiunan Du | Zhiliang Tian | Zhen Huang | Kailun Bian | Tianlun Liu | Zhaoning Zhang | Xinwang Liu | Feng Liu | Dongsheng Li
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
LLMs with in-context learning (ICL) obtain remarkable performance but are sensitive to the quality of ICL examples. Prior works on ICL example selection explored unsupervised heuristic methods and supervised LLM-based methods, but they typically focus on the selection of individual examples and ignore correlations among examples. Researchers use the determinantal point process (DPP) to model negative correlations among examples to select diverse examples. However, the DPP fails to model positive correlations among examples, while ICL still requires the positive correlations of examples to ensure the consistency of examples, which provides a clear instruction for LLMs. In this paper, we propose an ICL example selection method based on the nonsymmetric determinantal point process (NDPP) to capture positive and negative correlations, considering both the diversity and the relevance among ICL examples. Specifically, we optimize NDPP via kernel decomposition-based MLE to fit a constructed pseudo-labeled dataset, where we also propose a low-rank decomposition to reduce the computational cost. Further, we perform query-aware kernel adaptation on our NDPP to customize the input query, and we select examples via a MAP inference based on the adapted NDPP. Experimental results show our model outperforms strong baselines in ICL example selection.